How would you explain a database to a 10-year-old child?

You put information in, and information comes out. You can choose which bits you want, but you don’t have to worry about how it’s stored inside as it takes care of it all for you.

When choosing between programming languages with which to implement a specific project, what are the most important factors and why?

Readability, because you might not be the person who develops it later, modularity so you don’t have to rewrite it from scratch every time you want to change something, and level of abstractness. You wouldn’t write a web-based mark-up language in Assembly, nor would you write a boot-loader in Java

Pseudocode me an algorithm to detect whether two rectangles (with known top, left, bottom and right) overlap one another.

I’m not going to write the whole thing here, but you check all four boundaries against all other four boundaries. To be more efficient, break out as soon as you find an overlap as there’s no point in checking the rest (Okay, there is, but you weren’t specific enough to need it)

What is bytecode? Can it be reverse-engineered?

A sick and wrong attempt at assembly, and it can be, but I don’t want to do it.

What is the sum of all numbers from 1 to 1000?

Ask Gauss. Seriously, it’s 500x(1001)

Do you make mistakes? Tell me about one of them.

Doing this when I should have gone home half an hour ago. You gimp.

Are you smart? Why do you think that?

No, and people who do need pulling down off their pedestal. Everything’s subjective when it comes to intelligence.